


Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

by thinkaboutsailing



Series: The Intense Pleasure and Pain of Being Seen by Someone [3]
Category: Little Women (2019)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23189961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkaboutsailing/pseuds/thinkaboutsailing
Summary: It begins, as every well-written desire does: subtly. Jo’s hands linger on Friedrich’s arms when they say goodnight; her kisses increase in length and passion; she becomes far more aware of his curls, his height, his kindness and curiosity.
Relationships: Friedrich Bhaer/Josephine March
Series: The Intense Pleasure and Pain of Being Seen by Someone [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643086
Comments: 3
Kudos: 84





	Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

**Author's Note:**

> What I intended to be a short, (smutty) end to this series turned into a somewhat in-depth look at Jo and Friedrich at Plumfield. 
> 
> Reminders: We have real birth control now, so use it and stay safe kids! Also, please wash your hands for 20 seconds like all the time, don't be racist, donate to food banks, and stay inside as much as possible.

One night, when she is suffering from a cold and a strangely sore ankle, she retires early and weeps herself exhaustedly into sleep, missing Beth and missing home so much that her current ailment pales in comparison. Another night, she wakes from a sailing dream, inspiration striking somewhere before dawn, and she leaps out of bed to capture it on paper. She sprawls, either on her bed or on the small couch that is one of the only pieces of furniture Aunt March left her, missing Beth and thinking of new stories she would tell her, or pouring poetry out of herself, or catching ideas for lessons on slips of paper that make the large, cold room more familiar. It is nights like these that she is grateful for her solitude, and her liberty, bound by nothing, and to no one, to share her room or herself. She is free to write well into the night or throw herself onto the large bed as early as she pleases. 

Other nights, she desires other things. 

It begins, as every well-written desire does: subtly. Jo’s hands linger on Friedrich’s arms when they say goodnight; her kisses increase in length and passion; she becomes far more aware of his curls, his height, his kindness and curiosity. 

This desire is easy to forget in the whirl of activity that comes with the preparation and opening of a school: finding furniture and supplies; writing lessons; hiring other teachers to fill the gap in mathematics and science left by the writing, language, and music enthusiasts that are Jo March and Friedrich Bhaer. 

They deliberate excitedly, and argue some, and almost forget to eat, and Jo falls in love for the hundredth time with the general rush of a house full of interesting people all talking about interesting things. 

So her school is established, and at the end of the first day - what a strange phenomenon! the concrete beginning of something as elusive and mystical as education - when she watches the students run home, she cries a little. They are tears of pride and creation, and of the residual magic and wonder that children tend to leave behind. She flies through the house, laughing, and shaking hands with and embracing her wonderful teachers. They all dine together that night, and Jo embraces them once again when they retire to their respective rooms; they are part of a little brigade she has established, and she loves them all dearly. 

Even in the midst of this, however, some nights, desire comes back to her. Nights when she is lying in the large bed that used to belong to Aunt March, considering the fact that Friedrich is just down the corridor and up the stairs. Nights when they meet in the kitchen after everyone else has gone to bed and they can be more relaxed in their secrecy; when his waistcoat is unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, hair just a bit more unruly than usual, when first they apologized and explained themselves regarding Jo’s stories, and now drink tea and tell absurd stories and fond memories. It is nights like these, when he looks at her intently from across the small table, that she takes his hand and wonders vaguely how it would feel on her skin elsewhere. 

* * *

She tries to coax some information out of Amy on a walk one day, but that is difficult given her sister’s devotion to ladylike behavior and the fact that Jo cannot betray her curiosity for fear of prying questions. “Are you still yourself, even though you are in love?” she finally asks, hoping this will lead to something she can use. 

“Yes, I’m still myself,” Amy answers. “I just have more knowledge.” Jo doesn’t have to look at her to catch her mischievous glimmer.

“Of what?” she asks, preparing to reel Amy in. 

“Jo, I can’t tell you, you devil!” she laughs. 

“Why?” Jo laughs. “What happened to the excitable romantic who told me to run to the train station?” she inquires, teasingly. 

“She is a tight-lipped wife,” Amy retorts, and Jo rolls her eyes. 

Seeing this, Amy acquiesces, only a little. 

“I have increased knowledge of an art form I _cannot_ tell you about.” 

“You’re no help,” Jo says, pushing her shoulder into Amy’s. 

* * *

One night, a month or so later, all of them, the boarders and some of the teachers of Plumfield, are reading in the sitting room, conversing and airing their harmless grievances against the chaotic, creative mob they welcome in to educate and nurture each day. They take coffee, some of them, and talk and read and play piano until late in the evening, and then they all gradually say goodnight until only Jo and Friedrich are left. 

Jo looks at the stairway up which the last person has vanished, then at Friedrich, who sits at the piano for a moment before standing to straighten up various sheets of music and books and papers left behind. Jo watches him, absentmindedly, vaguely conscious of how long she has been doing so. Some time passes and she knows it has been quite a lot, but she ignores the various deadlines she makes for herself to look away. It feels like lingering in the doorway of the beautiful library Aunt March kept: Jo knows she maybe shouldn’t, but what is before her is too wonderful that she feels she cannot, _should not_ , stop herself. 

After a while, Friedrich turns to her, likely to kiss her goodnight, and sees her, head tilted slightly, gazing at him. 

“What are you doing?” he asks slowly, an eyebrow raised in wonder and amusement. 

Jo begrudgingly removes herself from her reverie, sighing a little and gathering her things. She shakes her head and smiles without an ounce of truth and she knows it. 

She stands up and walks over to where he stands by the piano. 

“Goodnight,” she says.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” he replies.

He leans in a little, and Jo looks up a little. 

It is at this very moment, like several times before, that she considers the possibility of _not parting_ with Friedrich for the night. 

They manage to remain reasonably proper as they almost run upstairs to Friedrich’s room, which surprises Jo a little, but her attention is elsewhere. Then there is a lot of fumbling and almost tripping, an extension of desire mostly well restrained on any given day. And a shared uncertainty inherent to newness, but also a shared certainty that this is wanted; _this_ , which Jo has grown into wanting by virtue of his proximity, or maybe it is a wanting that started - to some small degree - with dancing back in New York, a desire to be close to Friedrich.

It is dark, so they disentangle themselves long enough to light a candle apiece - Jo successful only on her third try. 

She turns back to Friedrich, shaking out a match to which she barely gives enough thought to completely snuff out with her fingers, and he looks at her with that same loving intensity. Jo practically throws herself at him, fingers in his hair and arms around his shoulders, their chests pressed together. They stumble a little to his bed, and he asks if she will stay. _Yes,_ she says between kisses, _yes,_ _yes_. 

Like all things between them, there is some initial shyness, and clumsiness and humility, and tenderness, _and_ _desire_. Jo kisses him fervently, runs her hands over the soft beginnings of his beard, shifting to be ever-closer to him. Friedrich’s fingers brush Jo’s thigh as though to ask gentle, fluttery permission to proceed, and Jo pauses, not to change her mind, but to stand on the beach just as the waves pull away for an infinite moment. 

She is not a stranger to the sensation, but to be touched by Friedrich is new and blissful. Jo March, published author and lover of figurative language, likens it to a drop of cold water on the wrist in the midst of summer, or honey persuaded from a spoon, or something else her literary mind conjures up before abandoning its pursuit of comparison to think only of how _good_ he feels, how _good_ this, _this_ , feels. 

“Yes?” he whispers, and even with her eyes closed, she knows he is looking at her with that kind and curious gaze. 

“ _Yes_ ,” she replies, inhaling and exhaling and laughing slightly all at the same time. This, like kissing Friedrich, is like swimming, though more literally now, considering what his fingers have elicited from her. 

She opens her eyes for a moment to witness the soft, almost imperceptible glow of the room, and Friedrich’s closeness, and she reaches up to throw her arm across his shoulders and put her mouth on his neck and his collarbone along the line of his shirt, something she thought about once on Tuesday and twice on Thursday. 

Her kisses increase in pressure as do his fingers, which make her intoxicatingly wet, and soon she is lying back, _leaning_ back, her face turned upwards. 

“M _hm_ ,” she lets out, almost as if she were agreeing with a remark in a kitchen rendezvous at night, more like she is covertly pleading. 

He kisses her neck, whispers to her, slips his fingers inside her. 

_Oh_ , she says. _Oh_ , _yes._

_This_. 

* * *

“Can I ask you something?” she asks Meg one afternoon. It is a Sunday, and Jo has visited she and John for lunch; now the two sisters and the twins are in the garden. The little ones dash off to find flowers after Jo shows them how to make crowns and bouquets, and, alone with Meg, as with Amy, Jo must thread this needle carefully, acquire information in a clandestine manner. 

“Of course,” Meg answers. 

“Did you always want to have children?” 

Meg thinks for a moment, turning her face to the late autumn sun. 

“I always assumed I would,” she says. “After John and I married, and it became a real possibility, I had to think about it for a while...but yes, I wanted them.” 

“You waited?” Jo asks, somewhat surprised. 

“Well, there are ways to prevent…” Meg turns back to her and nods a little to finish her sentence. 

Jo’s expression betrays her curiosity, and Meg continues, dropping her voice a little even though they are alone. 

“If you watch your monthly closely, you can find windows of time in which you can be intimate with less of a chance of pregnancy.” 

Jo has read about this before, but Meg’s confirmation assures her. 

“Hmm,” she says, and Meg is about to ask why Jo is asking, but then Daisy and Demi, angels, Jo’s heroes, run back to them to display their matching little efforts, and Jo is rescued. 

* * *

She takes a long bath, reading sonnets and emerging flushed, with tendrils curled by the steam and a mind full of words. She puts on her chemise, and long socks because winter still holds onto the house, and a shawl and her writing jacket, tying her one vanity back loosely. On the nightstand next to her bed, there are two notebooks, and another one on the desk, and she grabs all three of them and sits back on the pillows. 

She writes some: an idea for her own sonnet, the beginnings of a play to show Daisy and Demi, a plan to introduce some older students to _Wuthering Heights_ , a short note in a journal regarding a dream she had about Beth, a reminder to tell Amy about a book a student had brought in about Michaelangelo. 

There is no beauty like putting pen to paper, to painting one’s thoughts in ink, and she smiles down at the trio of books in front of her, her mind made manifest. 

There is a quiet knock on the door, and Jo hypothesizes that it is either Friedrich or the sweet maid coming to check on her fire which is fortunately still burning; Concord winters do not easily acquiesce. 

She sets her pen aside and hops a little off the bed, pulling her jacket around her as she answers the door. 

The first of her hypotheses is correct, and she lets him in quickly. 

“I come to deliver this,” he says after kissing her cheek, holding up a copy of _The Odyssey_ Jo had convinced him to reread. 

“Thank you,” she says, smiling as she places it in the small bookshelf she had built in Aunt March’s old room. 

He lingers, and they discuss the day and one way or another, Jo asks if he wants to stay. They move swiftly from talking to kissing, and from that to fumbling over buttons on writing jackets and shirts and chemises. They are still somewhat new to this, so there is clumsiness there too, but the pleasure of closeness outweighs that. If Jo was fluttery with their first rendezvous when touches were under skirts and kisses over collars, she is awash in wanting now, now that Friedrich’s hands find her bare shoulder, her back, her hips, and she finds his. 

He touches between her legs at one point, her legs wrap around his waist at another, she accidentally elbows him in the chest, he mistakenly kisses her ribcage. Dialogue is sparsely written: a line of poetry responded to with a fleeting and breathless laugh, a whispered name, an occasional “Yes?” followed by a euphoric nod. But there is a wordless rhythm that is achieved eventually, Jo’s hips on Friedrich’s, both of them moving into each other like a divine ocean. The concentrated heaven drawn from her by his fingers is replaced with a more general bliss, but to see Friedrich, wildly intelligent and thoughtful and often soft-spoken, in such a state of intimacy and ecstasy is a different pleasure. Her room is farther away from the others’ and when Friedrich’s eyes close and he leans into her, Jo relishes the fact that he groans her name freely into her neck, a thrill running through her at the sound. 

After some time, he sighs deeply, and Jo kisses his cheek and then his shoulder and then sits back to look down at him in the almost nonexistent glow of the fire; curls a little sweaty, chest rising and falling a little, looking up at her, utterly worn out and happy. 

She looks back down at him, and he reaches up to brush back a long, winding piece of hair. 

“Which one is it from?” he says, always positioning questions as if he and Jo had been in the middle of a conversation. 

“What?” she asks, shaking her hair back, its ribbon lost somewhere in the time between Friedrich kissing Jo’s neck above her chemise and her eager and clumsy unbuttoning of his trousers. 

“The line,” he says sleepily, closing his eyes either to remember or to acquiesce to lush and lovely drowsiness. “Die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes…?”

“ _C'est pas grave_ ,” he says when she laughs and climbs off him to lie side by side. 

So they fall asleep whispering remembered lines of poetry and plays and original sweet nothings, hair in each other’s faces and limbs tangled up, and in one instant, in the middle of this night, when the fire has died out all the way and Jo stirs and moves a little closer to Friedrich, she thinks of Amy asking, _what else is love?_

 _This_. 

* * *

Jo considers, at times, the fact that she could have gone her entire life without knowing Friedrich; for two of her sisters married men who dwelled within the same house just across the way from them. _Her_ lover, she thinks with a wicked grin and a laugh to herself one morning, is from an ocean away, or at least a long train ride to a crowded city where he could have lived in a different boarding house. Jo does not think there is any rhyme or reason to their meeting; it just happened. Its simplicity is what she loves. They just _are_ , together. 

There _is_ romance too, but in a manner that Jo is proud to call just hers and Friedrich’s. It is a quiet (mostly) love, given that it is still a secret. When she thinks it over, this secret manner, she concludes that it is so mostly because of her stubborn pride, for if Jo’s heroine cannot be consistent, at least her author can be. And of course, the boarders and teachers and students must be taken into consideration as well, for this prized institution - both of theirs - needs no scandal. 

So they remain as quiet as two lovers who meet in secret can, and when others are absent, riot down one of Aunt March’s old hallways like they did in New York. Jo adds sonnets to her repertoire, and when she has time, teases and praises and loves her dear professor with her pen, slipping the notes under his door or into his tweed pocket in passing in the afternoon. 

One night, when she is under the weather, she climbs into bed early and drifts in and out of sleep missing Beth, until Friedrich sneaks in to bring her tea and lie beside her. Another night, inspiration wakes her somewhere before dawn, and she slips out of bed to capture it on paper, returning to find him deeply asleep, his arms reached out towards her side of the bed. She sprawls, either on her bed or on the small couch, his mouth at her neck or between her legs, teasing her something wicked. She pours poetry out of herself, and discusses ideas for lessons with him, and curls into him and dozes off as he reads. It is nights like these that she is grateful for the company of her lover, bound by nothing but her heart to this loving professor to share her bed and herself, as she now gladly does most nights. Wild nights they are, indeed. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, inspired by "I Keep My Visions to Myself" by FirstAudrina and "The Bridal Tour" by Harvey_King (Delphi), as well as Middlemarch's "A Party Hardly Ever Goes the Way it is Planned." 
> 
> This will be the end of this loose series, but I may write a couple extra one-shots if I am so inspired. 
> 
> Stay safe, everyone.
> 
> Extra Notes: 
> 
> • “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” is, of course, the name of the iconic poem by another Massachusetts literary icon, Emily Dickinson. 
> 
> • The “To die in thy lap and be buried in thine eyes” line is from Act V, Scene III of Much Ado About Nothing. I read about its meaning in this lovely intellectually horny article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/4/23/8479871/shakespeare-dirty-jokes and thought it would work well in this fic, considering the context in which it is said. 
> 
> • “Rioting down the hallway” I borrowed from middlemarch’s “A Party Hardly Ever Goes the Way it is Planned”


End file.
